


Hiraeth

by Penthesilea1623



Category: Dragon Age, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Haunted by the past, Homesickness, Regret
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-25
Updated: 2015-01-25
Packaged: 2018-03-09 01:38:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3231377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Penthesilea1623/pseuds/Penthesilea1623
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Solas learns the name of the one who fell from the Fade after the explosion at the Temple of Sacred Ashes, and learns that his past is still haunting him.  A one-shot originally posted on my tumblr.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hiraeth

_Hiraeth: (n.) A homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past._

 

She’s quiet as they make their way up the mountainside to the temple. She feels better with a bow in her hand, but the panic is simmering just below the surface. Accused of tearing a hole in the sky and of killing their ‘divine’ — something like a keeper was to the clan only for hundreds of thousands of shemlen. And this strange mark on her hand. She looks down at her hand, tightens it into a fist and then opens it just a little. The light flares. She doesn’t like looking at it, doesn’t like the strange green glow, and she quickly closes it again. 

When she looks up, the dwarf, Varric, is watching her, not unsympathetically. She blinks her large dark eyes at him and he smiles.

"In all the excitement I don’t think we caught your name." He says in a jovial voice.

Does she want them to know her name? If she gave it would it give them power, or her? Deciding she has no power to worry about losing at this point, she tells him.

"Hiraeth. Hiraeth Lavellan."

"What did you say?" The question is abrupt and comes from Solas — an elf, but not, she thinks, one of the People.

He's stopped walking and she has to turn around to face him. "Hiraeth." She says again. "Hiraeth Lavell…." 

He cuts her off. “Hiraeth?” He repeats. His pronunciation is different, richer, more foreign sounding. 

She nods. ”It means a longing for a lost home…” She starts to say and again he cuts her off.

"I know what it means." He says sharply and she would be offended if not for the pain she can hear in his voice. 

"Our hahren gave it to me. He said he went to the Beyond while he slept and someone there told him to give it as a name to the next child born to our clan." She’s not sure why she’s telling him this. There’s certainly nothing in his manner that invites confidences, and indeed he’s staring at her now as if she’s grown a second head. 

"Hahren?" Says the dwarf thoughtfully. "That’s like a storyteller, isn’t it? So you’re Dalish then?" 

She turns back to him with some relief. ”Yes. I am one of the People.” She and the dwarf begin walking again.

Solas can hear the pride in her voice, but the contempt he normally feels for the Dalish is strangely absent. 

Hiraeth. 

The old man he’d told scornfully to give that as a name had gotten the meaning wrong, of course. He’d taken only those parts of it that suited his own beliefs and tossed the rest away. Typical.

Hiraeth didn’t refer to a homsickness for Arlathan, or even the Dales.

Hiraeth was the grief, the longing, the ache to return to a world, to a time and a place that was lost, that could never, under any circumstances be regained; completely and utterly and irrevocably lost, so lost that the only thing that remained of it was the unbearable pain of that loss, the only thing that remained was _hiraeth_.

He’d listened to that old man in the Fade go on about the glory and magnificence of what the elves had lost, and then the man had the gall to ask if Solas had some knowledge of the elvhen that he could bring back to his clan, and Solas had looked at him and thought, _you know nothing of loss_ , and had given him the only word that came close to describing true loss. His loss.

Hiraeth. 

And now she was here, and with the anchor on her hand.

If he didn’t know better he’d say Fen’Harel, the Dread Wolf, had been up to his tricks again.

**Author's Note:**

> Hiraeth is a Welsh word, pronounced "here-eye-th"


End file.
